An ordinary addiction memoir set in an extraordinary place—worth reading for the descriptions of life on a “beautiful,...
After a decade in London, a troubled woman returns home to a rural island in northern Scotland, hoping to heal.
Liptrot begins with the harrowing details of her birth. When she was just hours old, her mother rode a wheelchair down the runway of an airport and placed her in the lap of her straightjacket-clad father, who was to be airlifted to a mental hospital on the mainland. It’s a fitting introduction to the chronicle of a life plagued with hardship. The author grew up on a farm high on the cliffs of Orkney: “nothing but cliffs and ocean between it and Canada.” Her parents were outsiders from England who had come to the insular island to start anew, and they were an odd pair—an evangelical Christian and a bipolar schizophrenic. Liptrot longed to escape and eventually did, to London. Of course, the pain didn’t disappear; she found herself covering it up with destructive behavior: drugs, alcohol, and meaningless sex. As she writes, “my life was rough and windy and tangled.” Bookstores are packed with countless addiction memoirs, and there are also plenty that see a prodigal son or daughter coming home to slay his or her demons. What makes Liptrot’s book different is the otherworldly setting. When she returned to the Orkneys, she immersed herself in nature, taking long walks around her family’s wind-swept land, early-morning swims in the frigid cold Atlantic Ocean, watching the northern lights from an old theater in the middle of town, and tracking the flocks of birds coming down from the Arctic. Eventually, Liptrot found peace and began to imagine a kind of future she had never before thought possible. She also includes a glossary to define such terms as “haar” (sea fog) and “kirk" (church).
An ordinary addiction memoir set in an extraordinary place—worth reading for the descriptions of life on a “beautiful, barely touched stretch of land.”Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-60896-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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